Sovereign Intimacies with Un/Spoken: Online Video Screening Program

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Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O'Brien), "Wrapped in the Cloud," 2018

video still © Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O'Brien), 2018. Produced in collaboration with Conrad Sly, Hannah Turner, Reese Muntean, and Kate Hennessy. Video, 4 mins.

While Gallery 1C03's physical space remains closed during the pandemic, we invite you to connect with us this fall through our online programs.

Gallery 1C03 is honoured to invite you to a durational reading by M. NourbeSe Philip on Wednesday, December 9 at 6pm CT as part of the Sovereign Intimacies exhibition and as part of Zong! Global 2020. M. NourbeSe Philip presents the first online global iteration of the annual durational reading of Zong!, her acclaimed book-length poem. The 10-day durational reading commemorates the massacre of some 150 enslaved Africans, which began on November 29, 1781 and continued for the following 10 days. In its eighth year of production, the sequential reading will consist of prerecorded readings/collective performances of the text, interspersed by 3 live simultaneous collective readings. These readings run from November 30 to December 9, 2020 culminating with this live reading hosted by Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art and presented in partnership with Gallery 1C03, with support from Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

This year’s shared and collective reading grounds itself in the 2015 UN declaration of the International Decade for People of African Descent whose theme is “recognition, justice and development,” and commemorates those who lost their lives on board the Zong. 2020’s reading will take place within the still-present context of the worldwide uprising against anti-Black racism sparked by the lynching of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020. While this act of remembrance resides in the particularity of anti-Black racism, it also embraces the words of Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer that until all are free none is free. With that in mind the Zong! Global 2020 reading acknowledges and honours the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean—those who first walked this land in love, respect and wisdom and who continue to face the depredations of anti-Indigenous racism. As such Zong! Global 2020 bears witness to the collective grief we bear and witness in the face of the ongoing destruction of the earth, our only home.

Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text, the only extant, public document related to the massacre. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

Zong! has also been presented in three dramatic performances by theatrical directors and excerpts of Zong! have been used in six different visual arts installations by different artists in five countries.

About the Artist

Born in Tobago, M. NOURBESE PHILIP is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practised law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos, and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council), the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize(USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto), and Dora Award finalist (drama). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts)and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers’ retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Sovereign Intimacies is a group exhibition, curated by Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith, co-presented by Gallery 1C03 and Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition takes place at Plug In ICA and online with extensive programming that consists of online talks, workshops, screenings, and poetry readings.

Sovereign Intimacies explores themes of cultural and community exchange between Indigenous artists and artists from the diaspora, more specifically artists who are First Nations, Inuit and Métis collaborating with artists living in what is currently called Canada who came to this land and are not part of the settler/colonial history of the country. The group show consists of pairings of artists, as well as individuals, whose work is based on process and relationship building, and for those whose work is invested in active conceptualization around topics of friendship and intimacy, who are working to build collective vision of a sovereign future.

The curatorial intention is to present not only work in a gallery space, but to focus on an extensive online public program featuring readings, talks, workshops, screenings, and other local community engagements and encounters. The aim is to construct a space where these conversations highlight collaboration and exchange of knowledge. The community is centered, knowing that this exhibition cannot respond to and encompass all the needs of future discussions, but sets the goals for the community to continue these discussions to amplify our collective voice.

Featuring the work of Hassaan Ashraf, Annie Beach, Ayumi Goto, iris yirei hu, melannie monoceros, Peter Morin, Mariana Muñoz Gomez, Wanda Nanibush, Meghann O’Brien, M. NourbeSe Philip, Marie-Anne Redhead, Cheyenne Thomas and David Thomas.

Further details about these online programming events and how to connect with them will be posted at www.uwinnipeg.ca/art-gallery and www.plugin.org closer to event dates.

November 5 – 18 Video Screening curated by Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead presented with Video Pool Media Arts Centre and VUCAVU.

November 9 at 7 pm CT Discussion with Filmmakers moderated by Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead.

Discussion with filmmakers

November 9 at 7:00 pm CT

Introduced by Sovereign Intimacies curators Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith.

Featuring Un/spoken curators Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead in conversation with Marissa Sean Cruz and Léuli Eshrāghi. 

Register to attend this event as a zoom webinar!

We are pleased to announce Un/spoken, an online video screening program curated by Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead as part of our fall program, Sovereign Intimacies. Un/spoken can be watched online from November 5 - 18 on VUCAVU. 

Un/spoken weaves together work by Indigenous artists and racialized artists in diaspora from all over the world. It features works by Sebastien Aubin, Marissa Sean Cruz, Léuli Eshrāghi, Sky Hopinka, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Karin Lee. 

Each short film or video work takes up the theme of relationships; relationships to each other, to culture and language, to place, to the land, to nonhuman beings, to ourselves. Sometimes these relationships are fraught with fragmentation, dislocation and disappearances due to processes of colonialism, imperialism and ecological devastation. These films encourage us to explore the ways we relate to each other, to our worlds, to our histories and ways of being.

There will also be an online gathering on November 9 at 7:00 pm CT with Sovereign Intimacies curators Nasrin Himada and Jennifer Smith, screening program curators Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Marie-Anne Redhead, and filmmakers Marissa Sean Cruz and Léuli Eshrāghi. Please register to attend this event as a zoom webinar.

November 16 at 7 pm CT Artist Talk by iris yirei hu

November 26 at 6 pm CT Poetry Reading/Workshop with melannie monoceros

December 3 at 6 pm CT Lecture by Wanda Nanibush

December 9 at 6 pm CT Durational Reading by M. NourbeSe Philip